Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

I must admit that Terminator 3 was a film I never thought would actually happen. James Cameron wasn't interested, Arnie's getting on a bit and the last one was more than a decade ago, so would anyone really care? However, Arnie's career hasn't exactly been on sparkling form recently and what better than to reprise his most famous role. The original two films are genre classics, with Cameron's ability to mix action, big ideas and state of the art effects (at least for the second, the first film was pretty low budget). This time Jonathan Mostow is behind the camera, whose highest profile credit is for the history re-writing submarine thriller, U-571. James Cameron is not really a film composer's director and it's probably a credit to Brad Fiedel that he managed to work with Cameron three times without getting into a bare knuckle fight. However, for this second sequel, Fiedel is replaced by Marco Beltrami and the results aren't really better, just louder.
While a competent synth specialist, Brad Fiedel hasn't exactly made earth shattering contributions to movie music, but his original Terminator theme is fairly well known and engaging in its metallic simplicity. Beltrami has essentially eschewed Fiedel's limited synthetic palette and gone for a hard edged mixture of orchestra and synths, both in terms of eerie noises and banging percussion. While many times more complex than the music for the originals, Beltrami's music is possibly even less memorable. The best tracks are undoubtedly at the beginning and the end. A Day in the Life has a suitably apocalyptic feel to it and Hooked on Multiphonics adds a choir for an ever greater sense of epic doom. Blonde Behind the Wheel then engages fully into action mode and the results are reasonable, a bit heavy on the synth percussion and fairly aimless, but exciting enough. However, most of the rest of album sags into a quagmire of unexciting suspense cues and even more irritatingly noisy action. Hearse Rent A Car sounds curiously like Joel McNeely's brutal score to Soldier, but Beltrami and synth designer Buck Sanders smother the orchestra in bleeping and it becomes almost intolerable, despite its brevity.

JC (John Conner) Theme is one promising moment of calm in the din, but isn't quite substantial enough to make itself memorable, the same goes for the other brief, quiet moments such as More Deep Thought and Dual Terminator. The final three tracks have the strongest identity of the entire album. The first of the three is Beltrami's great update of Fiedel's original theme, expanding it out for full orchestra. The last two tracks, labeled as Bonus Tracks, are both surprisingly low key songs. I rather assumed they'd be heavy rock, but the first (composed by Beltrami) has an indie feel (vaguely reminding me of one of my favourite groups, My Life Story) and well performed by Dillon Dixon. The second (composed by Mia Julia) is more of a subtle country effort, given a sensitive performance by the composer. After the headache inducing bluster of the score, the songs are a welcome inclusion and Beltrami's contribution here is far superior to much of his score. His music rarely does much for me and Terminator 3 doesn't really change this; big on bluster and density, but low on personality, subtlety and listenability.